BIG DEAL; The Apartment Monologues

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

Published: July 17, 2005

THE playwright Eve Ensler broke up with her longtime companion Ariel Orr Jordan in December and ever since the couple have been fighting over three apartments they own together on an upper floor of a co-op building at 16 West 16th Street.

The lovers' spat landed in court and legal papers detailing the clash read at times like an embittered bedroom farce, with Ms. Ensler and Mr. Jordan bouncing between apartments, changing the locks, shutting off the electricity and squabbling over their possessions.

The story, as outlined in a pair of his and hers lawsuits, one filed by Mr. Jordan in late April and the other filed by Ms. Ensler in early May, begins, in real estate terms, in 1977. That was the year Ms. Ensler bought Apartment 14SN at 16 West 16th Street, a beige brick building between Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas, with her husband at the time, Richard McDermott. Ms. Ensler and Mr. McDermott were divorced in 1989, and as part of the settlement she was allowed to keep the apartment.

About the same time, she began dating Mr. Jordan, a psychotherapist and a director of television movies and commercials, and he moved in with her in either 1989 or 1990. The couple cannot agree on the date. In their early years together, Ms. Ensler set to work on her play ''The Vagina Monologues,'' which won an Obie Award in 1997, becoming a feminist standard and conferring on her a degree of celebrity. Mr. Jordan says it was in 1993 that Ms. Ensler first debuted an early version of the play, and he also says it was in that year that Mr. McDermott's name was removed from the shares of Apartment 14SN and Mr. Jordan's name was added, making him a tenant in common with Ms. Ensler.

Mr. Jordan claims that he had been supporting Ms. Ensler -- he describes her as having been a ''struggling playwright'' -- and that they considered themselves ''husband and wife.''

''We shared everything,'' he wrote in an affidavit filed with the court last month. Ms. Ensler, on the other hand, claims that Mr. Jordan was only a ''nominal'' owner of the apartment and that his name was placed on the shares merely to facilitate the refinancing of a $40,000 bank loan. He agreed, she says in an affidavit of her own, ''that Apt. 14SN was, and would always be, mine.'' She also contends that she spent as much as $72,000 to renovate the apartment, while he spent far less. He counters that he contributed $75,000 to the renovation and put it nine months as a ''general contractor overseeing virtually every single detail of the work.''

But back in the 90's these sorts of disputes were still in the future. In September 1997, less than four months after Ms. Ensler won an Obie for ''The Vagina Monologues,'' the pair paid $125,000 for a studio apartment next door, No. 14UN, which became an office for Ms. Ensler and V-Day, an organization she created to help battered women. In late 2000, they paid $185,000 for the next apartment down the hall, No. 14TN, another studio, which Mr. Jordan converted into an office for himself.

For reasons that are not revealed in either lawsuit, the couple split up last December. In January, Mr. Jordan, 58, says, he left town for three days and came home to find that the locks had been changed on apartment 14SN. ''I was forced for the next two and a half months to sleep on the floor of my tiny studio office in the building, with no kitchen and no access to my clothes and personal belongings,'' he writes.

Ms. Ensler then left town too, on a trip to France, and he says the only way he could get to his possessions was when her employees were in the apartment.

In March, however, Mr. Jordan learned that Ms. Ensler, 52, had bought a $2.4 million apartment a few blocks north, near the Flatiron Building, and he realized ''she had no intention of ever returning to Apt. 14SN.'' He got one of Ms. Ensler's employees to let him in and, ''when the employee left me alone in the apartment,'' he says in the affidavit, ''I called a locksmith, had him change the locks and moved back into my home.'' He says that on the same day, Ms. Ensler called Con Edison and had the electricity to the apartment cut off.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Ensler sees the episode differently. She does not say whether she locked him out, but contends only that while she was in France Mr. Jordan changed the lock and then would not give her a key.

In April, however, a lawyer for Ms. Ensler sent Mr. Jordan's lawyer a list of items she wanted from the apartment. It is a kind of melancholy inventory of a breakup, with items that seem alternately intimate and mundane: a Buddhist altar, a set of pink towels, ''all of the glass hearts that Ms. Ensler has placed in the living room,'' several rugs, a sleeping bag, her clothes, a portrait of Gandhi. Mr. Jordan claims that some of the items belonged to both of them but that nonetheless he allowed the movers she sent to take them from the apartment.

Ms. Ensler's lawyer, Peter Bienstock, said she would not discuss the case. ''She's moved on from her relationship just as she's moved on from 16th Street to her new place,'' he said. A publicist said that Ms. Ensler was in Cairo for the opening of a women's shelter.